ST achieves EAL5+ certification for 32-bit smart card MCU

STMicroelectronics announced that the established ST22L12832-bitsecure microcontroller has received 'Common Criteria' security certification at Evaluation Assurance Level EAL5+ (Augmented). The formal recognition will now enable 3G network operators to extend their secure mobile services with M-commerce and digital signature applications, and will provide new opportunities in banking and ID market segments.

The Common Criteria revision 2.2 certificate follows stringent and independent evaluation of the ST22L128 itself, its dedicated software, and its design and manufacturing processes. ST has more than 20 years experience in the design of silicon products to the highest levels of security, and is a major manufacturer for the smart card market as well as the leading supplier of secure ICs to the financial sector for card applications. The 'security culture' of its design and manufacturing activities has been instrumental in progressing smoothly and rapidly to formal security certification.

The ST22L128 is a member of ST's SmartJ platform, whose 32-bit secure RISC architecture has been developed specifically to provide very fast execution of Java, the programming language commonly used for applets downloaded to secure mobile applications. It is a single-chip 0.18-micron CMOS 32-bit MCU with ROM, RAM and EEPROM memories, plus additional hardware resources for dynamic memory protection and fire walling, security domain management, random number generation and other chip security mechanisms and algorithms.

The core augments its own highly efficient native RISC instruction set with a hardware decoder that directly converts most of the Java Card byte codes into native microcode instructions, eliminating the overheads and lower performance of processors based on Java emulation and reducing power consumption. The dedicated software for the ST22L128 includes a Hardware Software Interface (HSI) module for the management of communications with the application software layer, a secure test operating system (Autotest), and a library of cryptographic services of which the DES, Triple DES, AES, the Prime Number generator and SHA-1 functions have been evaluated and certified under Common Criteria.

STMicroelectronics has delivered more than 10 million ST22 32-bit smart card microcontrollers. ST demonstrated the world's first secure 32-bit MCU for smart cards in 1999 and now has an unrivalled range of 32-bit devices based around the SmartJ core. The ST22 family - in which the ST22L128 is the first to achieve EAL5+ certification - is the most complete secure platform in the market, offering a broad range of memory and communications interface configurations.

The SmartJ family of MCUs is suited to the needs of 3G mobile applications using (U) SIM cards (Universal Subscriber Identity Modules), as well as to pay-TV, IT security and banking applications. They have sufficient memory capacity to store Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) data and photographic images, coupled with the processing and communication power to support high-data-rate transfer protocols such as the USB-Full speed.